Chapter 17 #2
“I more than knew,” he corrected, low and strained.
“It’s not something that has to be taught.
It’s instinct. The wolf knows what claiming is the way it knows how to hunt.
The way it knows how to track a scent or fight for territory.
” He stared at the fire, his hands gripping his own knees.
“The ritual. The mating. Under the moon. The bite that opens the bond. The way the power flows through blood and body. I’ve known it since my wolf arrived at fifteen.
It lives in my bones like a second language I never asked to learn. ”
The admission landed in my stomach like a stone.
“So you knew exactly what you could do to me,” I said it the way you state weather. Fact. Nothing underneath. “Every time you were near me. Every time you smelled my blood. You knew the steps. You knew how to take my power and make it yours.”
“Yes,” he confirmed, and the word was unflinching.
“I know exactly how it works. I know the moon phase. I know where the bite goes. I know what the wolf does during the claiming, the shift, the teeth, the way the bond locks into place.” His gaze found mine.
“I know all of it the way a wolf knows how to kill. It’s written into what I am. ”
He turned back to the fire, his throat working around what came next.
“But there’s something my father never understood,” he went on, and the next part came out like a confession.
“He took Sophia’s power by force and it drained her.
Piece by piece. Every time he claimed her, she had less.
He got stronger and she got weaker until there was nothing left.
” He looked at me, the firelight catching the scar across his cheekbone.
“I don’t think it has to work that way. I think, the wolf in me believes, that if the giving is willing, the power doesn’t drain.
It flows. Both ways. Amplifies instead of consuming. ”
“You think,” I repeated flatly, folding my arms across my chest. “You believe.”
“I can’t prove it,” he admitted, pressing the heels of his hands against his eyes.
“No werewolf has ever tried. No blood-keeper has ever survived long enough for anyone to find out. It’s instinct, not knowledge.
A feeling in the wolf’s blood that consent changes the equation.
” He dropped his hands and held my gaze. “I could be wrong.”
“And if you’re wrong, I end up like Sophia,” I stated.
He dipped his chin once. “Yes. Which is why I will never ask.”
“And you expect me to believe you’d never ...”
“I would die first,” he snarled, and the ferocity of it shook dust from the ceiling.
His whole body had gone rigid, not with shame this time but with something fiercer, revulsion aimed inward.
“I watched what my father did to Sophia. I was seventeen years old. I heard it through the walls of his cabin. I heard her screaming and I heard him ...” He stopped.
His throat worked. “I would tear the wolf out of my own chest with my bare hands before I did that to you. To anyone.”
“Pretty words,” I shot back. “Your father probably told Sophia something similar.”
“My father is a monster,” Dietrich ground out, and the sound that came with it wasn’t entirely human, a vibration beneath the words, the wolf pressing close to the surface.
He caught himself. Breathed. Pulled it back.
“My father is a monster and I am his son and I carry the same instinct in my blood. I won’t pretend otherwise.
The wolf wants the claiming. Every time I’m near you, every time I smell your power, it’s there, the pull, the ritual, the knowledge of exactly how to do it. ”
He stepped closer. I refused to budge.
“But wanting and doing are not the same thing,” he continued.
“I have wanted to claim you since the night I carried you out of the forest. The wolf has screamed for it every single night. And every single night I’ve walked into the snow and changed and run until the wanting was small enough to lock away. ”
“And the night we were together?” I demanded, tears burning my face. “Was the wolf screaming then?”
“Louder than it ever has,” he admitted, and a tear tracked down his cheek.
“You were beneath me and the moon was up and your blood was singing and every instinct I had was telling me to shift and bite and take.” He broke on the next part.
“And I didn’t. I held it back. I stayed human.
I stayed the man you were choosing to be with. Because that’s who I wanted to be.”
“How do I know?” I pressed, relentless. “How do I know what I saw on your face that night, the shaking, the tears, wasn’t you fighting the claiming instinct instead of being overwhelmed by what I was giving you?”
“Both,” he whispered. “Both were happening. The tears were real because a woman was touching me for the first time in my life and I didn’t know a body could feel that much.
And I was fighting the hardest battle of my life at the same time, keeping the wolf caged while you showed me what it meant to be human. ”
He swallowed hard.
“Both things are true,” he repeated. “And I’m not going to pretend one cancels the other because it doesn’t.
I was the man crying in your arms and I was the wolf fighting to claim you and they were happening in the same body at the same moment and that’s the truth of what I am.
Man and wolf. Love and hunger. Both. Always. ”
He rubbed his face with both hands. When they dropped, his eyes were red.
“You turned me into this, Talia. You didn’t mean to, but you did.
Before you came here I was nothing. A dead man walking circles in an empty cottage.
Then you showed up with your blood and your fire and your stubborn, impossible heart and the wolf woke up and I woke up with it and now I can’t put either of us back to sleep. ”
I stared at him.
“You watched me fight my father,” he added, steadying himself. “You watched him throw me into trees. Tear my shoulder apart. Nearly kill me. If I’d claimed you, if your Forceweaving had poured into me the way Sophia’s Sensing poured into him, do you think that fight would have gone the way it did?”
The memory was vivid. The gray wolf’s superior strength. Dietrich outmatched from the first lunge, fighting on stubbornness and desperation.
“If I had your power, I would have torn him apart in seconds,” he went on quietly. “Instead I nearly died in the snow. That’s not the body of a man who’s stolen his lover’s magic.”
He was right. I hated that he was right. Hated it because being right about this didn’t erase the lie and didn’t change the fact that every time he’d touched me the question had been there, was this love or was this hunger?
Both. The answer was both. And I didn’t know how to live with that.
“We are not what we were,” I declared.
He didn’t move.
“Whatever happened between us, the night I let you inside my body, that was between me and a man I thought I knew.” I held the words in place through sheer will.
“I don’t know you. I don’t know where the man ends and the wolf begins.
And until I do, you don’t get to touch me. You don’t get to hold me.”
He bowed his head.
“The wolf,” I continued, and the anger sank into something worse. “You just told me it screams for the claiming every time you’re near me. That it was screaming while we ...” I stopped and after a pause spoke again. “Can it take over? Can the instinct override the man?”
“I’ve held it back every time,” he replied, his eyes on the floor.
“That’s not what I asked,” I pressed. “Can it win?”
He was quiet for a long time. His hands gripped his own thighs until the knuckles went white.
“If I stopped fighting,” he confessed, each word pulled from somewhere deep.
“If I let go. If the wolf was strong enough and I was weak enough, yes. It could win.” He looked up at me and his face held nothing back.
“That’s why I left every night. That’s why I slept outside.
It wasn’t just to patrol. It was because the wolf doesn’t understand consent.
It just wants. And I’ve been holding it back since the night I carried you out of the forest.”
Every night he’d left the cottage. Every morning he’d arrived at first light with shadows under his eyes. The night he’d hovered over my sleeping body and made that low, strained sound, a growl caught between need and restraint.
He’d been fighting the instinct to claim me. Every single night. Standing on the edge of something monstrous and choosing to walk away.
“If the wolf ever wins,” I told him, and the Forceweaving hummed beneath my skin, warm and ready and mine. “If you ever lose that fight, even for a second, I will kill you. I will put every thread of power I have into your chest and end you. For Sophia. For me.”
He looked into my eyes. The amber burned in the firelight and behind it I could see the wolf, watching me, wanting me, straining against chains held by a man who loved me too much to let it free.
“I know,” he replied quietly. “I’d want you to.”
“Good.” I crossed back to the bed and pulled the furs around my shoulders. “Sleep by the fire. Stay on your side of the room. Tomorrow you rebuild the shelf.”
He wiped his face with the back of his hand and settled by the hearth.
I opened the grimoire in my lap and stared at the pages. The rage burned low and steady in my chest. Banked coals that refused to go out.
But underneath the coals, buried so deep I could barely feel it, something else was smoldering.
The image of a name carved into birch bark by a nineteen-year-old boy who’d buried a stranger and visited her every day for more than two decades.
The way he’d sounded when he told me he’d tear the wolf from his own chest before he hurt me.
The admission, raw and unvarnished and terrifying, that both the love and the hunger were real and he couldn’t separate them and he’d been fighting every second and he was still fighting even now, sitting ten feet away from me with his head bowed and his shoulders shaking.
Man and wolf. Love and hunger. Both. Always.
I didn’t know how to live with that.
But I didn’t know how to leave it either.
Tomorrow there would be more questions. About the dream with the black wolf. About what it meant that his wolf had found me in my sleep. About Erik, and how to end him before he came back for the power he craved.
But tonight I sat with the grimoire and the anger and the thing underneath the anger that I refused to name, and I listened to him breathe across the room, and I let the new door hold against the winter wind, and I thought about Sophia under the birch tree and the boy who’d carved her name and the wolf who loved me and the man who was afraid of what that love could become.